Posted at 2nd Jan 2007 14:28.
I’ve written a new title renderer using GD2/FT2, and it works MUCH better. It didn’t automagically switch fonts to draw the Japanese, but I wrote a (slightly nasty) chunk of code that breaks it up into several rendering operations.
I still can’t decide whether I should cache the results, or just re-render them every time. Am going to look into the CPU usage of the text renders, but it seems very mild (the images render and load as quickly as the cached ones).